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The objective of board meetings should
always be to have great conversations that help you and your
executive team think clearly about the issues in front of you, as
well as making sure your directors have a clear and transparent
view of the state of the business. These conversations come from
a team dynamic that encourages productive conflict. There's no
sure-fire formula for achieving this level of engagement, but
here are three few guidelines you can follow to increase your
chances.

Schedule board meetingsin advance, and
forge a schedule that works. Nothing is
more disruptive – or more likely to drive low turnout – than
last minute scheduling. Make sure you, or your executive
assistant, knows board members’ general schedules and travel
requirements, and whether they manage their own calendar or have
their own executive assistant. Set your board meeting schedule
for the year in the early fall, which is typically when people
are mapping out most of their year’s major activities. If you
know that one of your board members has to travel for your
meetings, work with the CEOs of the other companies to coordinate
meeting dates. Vary the location of meetings if you have
directors in multiple geographies so travel is a shared
sacrifice.

In the startup stage of our business at Return Path, we ran
monthly meetings for an hour, mostly call-in. In the revenue
stage, we moved to six to eight meetings per year, two hours in
length, perhaps supplemented with two longer-form and in-person
meetings. As a growth stage company, we run quarterly meetings.
They’re all in-person, meaning every director is expected to
travel to every meeting. We probably lose one director each time
to a call-in or a no-show for some unavoidable conflict, but, for
the most part, everyone is present. We leave four hours for every
meeting (it’s almost impossible to get everything done in less
time than that) and sometimes we need longer.

Many years, we also hold a board offsite, which is a meeting that
runs across 24 hours, usually an afternoon, a dinner, and a
morning, and is geared to recapping the prior year and planning
out the next year together. It’s especially exhausting to do
these meetings, and I’m sure it’s especially exhausting to attend
them, but they’re well worth it. The intensity of the sessions,
discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for
everyone to get on the same page and remember what's working,
what's not, and what the world around us looks like as we dive
into the deep end for another year.

Build a forward-looking agenda.
The second step in having great board meetings is to set an
agenda that will prompt the discussion that you want to have.
With our current four-hour meetings, our time allocation is the
following:

I. Welcomes and framing (5 minutes)

II. Official Business (no more than 15 minutes unless something
big is going on)

a. You can spend this entire time on one topic, more than one, or
all, as needed.

b. Format for discussions can vary—this is a good opportunity for
breakout sessions, for example.

V. Executive Session (30 minutes)

This is your time with directors only, no observers or members of
the management team (even if they are board members).

VI. Closed Session (30 minutes)

This is director-only time, without you or anyone else from the
management team.

This agenda format focuses your meeting on the future, not the
past. In the early years of the business, our board meetings were
probably 75 percent “looking backwards” and 25 percent “looking
forwards.” They were reporting meetings—reports which were
largely in the hands of board members before the meetings anyway.
They were dull as anything, and they were redundant: all of our
board members were capable of processing historical information
on their own. Today, our meetings are probably ten percent
“looking backwards” and 90 percent “looking forwards”—and much
more interesting as a result.

Separate background reading andpresentation materials. Finally, focus on
creating a more engaging dialogue during the meeting by
separating background reading from presentation materials. In our
early days, we created a huge Powerpoint deck as both a handout
the week before the meeting and as the in-meeting deck. That
didn’t create an engaging meeting.

There’s nothing more mind-numbing than a board meeting where the
advance reading materials are lengthy Powerpoint presentations,
than when the meeting itself is a series of team members standing
up and going through the same slides, bullet by excruciating
bullet—that attendees could read on their own.

When we separated the background and presentation materials,
people were engaged by the Powerpoint—because it delivered fresh
content. We started making the decks fun and engaging and
colorful, as opposed to simple text and bullet slides. That was a
step in the right direction, but the preparation consumed twice
as much time for the management team, and we certainly didn’t get
twice the value from it.

Now we send out a great set of comprehensive reading materials
and reports ahead of the meeting, and then we have a completely
Powerpoint-free meeting. No slides on the wall. This changes the
paradigm away from a presentation—the whole concept of
“management presenting to the board”—to an actual discussion. No
checking email. No yawns. Nobody nodding off. Everyone—management
and board—is highly engaged.